Kris Madden | Remember the Name

By Alisha Proffitt • Photos By Matt Johnson 

At 26, Kris Madden has already built a résumé many designers spend years chasing. He has collaborated with major artists, watched his designs circulate through the music world, and developed a growing fashion label that reflects a clear vision. Still, in his Germantown studio, the focus remains on the work. 

His space is full of it. Rolls of leather and fabric line the wall. Pattern pieces spread across tables. Sewing machines sit beside garments in progress. Nearly every object in the room connects to something Madden has designed, cut, or sewn himself. Everything here is made by him. 

He is a self-taught designer who built the KRIS MADDEN brand from his own persistence. No fashion school. No internships. He learned by doing, failing, and throwing himself at the work until it stuck. 

“When I was 19, I was working two jobs. And I was really just kinda trying to figure out my lane in this world.” Even in high school, fashion, for Kris, was everything. But he didn’t want to just be the guy wearing the clothes. He had this impulsive desire to make them himself. On that impulse, Madden found an old sewing machine that had belonged to his grandmother and set it up in his mother’s garage. He decided to attempt a crewneck sweatshirt. The garment did not go well. 

“I made this god-awful crew neck from wool that didn’t even fit me because wool doesn’t stretch,” he says. “I didn’t know at the time.” 

But he loved the process. He kept at it. Tried it again. Then again. Until the vision he had in mind came together. “I enjoyed the process,” he says. “Because I still had the exact look I wanted.” 

Within a month, he took his first trip to New York City. He had never left his hometown before. The experience expanded his sense of possibility. “It totally changed my whole perspective on life,” he says. “Seeing New York for the first time, it was like, there’s so much more to life.” He came home, quit both jobs, and focused entirely on making clothes. Then COVID hit. He stayed inside, learned how to pattern, sew, and build garments from scratch. Most designers start by altering thrift store finds. Madden started from scratch. 

“The very first thing I made, I patterned it myself,” he says. “And I didn’t know at the time that would change my entire trajectory in the fashion world.” 

Madden moved to New York for a year. He hit up designers on Instagram. He introduced himself. He hustled. One connection led to designer KentuckyBoyTyler in Lexington, Kentucky, and that became his first real fashion gig. Nine months later, Tyler moved to California and invited Madden to visit. He planned to stay a week. He stayed for two and a half years. 

“I didn’t leave California for two and a half years,” he says. “Because I’m just going with the flow, man. I’m just trying to figure this out to the best of my ability.”

It was there that he made one of his first pieces that got real attention. “The real thing that really changed my life is Corporate Target,” Madden says. “It took me a few years of trying to assert myself within the fashion scene. That’s what was so important, putting myself out there, meeting these new people, and just focusing on the community and just not my own clothes and my own brand.”

The project was inspired by the crosshair or “target,” to Madden, symbolizing confrontation with the corporate systems that dominate the fashion industry and the ways in which large companies often absorb ideas from independent creators while having the resources to scale them instantly. By placing himself at the center of that idea (someone who designs, patterns, and constructs his work entirely on his own), Corporate Target is both a creative statement and a commentary on independence within a corporate-driven industry. “My skills and my drive are like a corporate company’s wet dream. They would love to have 15 people like me in a room.” 

He initially had made the Corporate Target hat for himself. “That was the first time I made a product that was just for me and me only. I had no intention of trying to sell it, I had no intention of putting it out there. I was just wearing it constantly,” he recalls.

People noticed. Friends borrowed it. Photos circulated. Eventually, it ended up on artists like Guillermo Andrade, Cole Bennett, and even found its way onto the head of Jack Harlow in a music video with over 100 million views. Corporate Target was born. “I made Corporate Target 3 years ago, and I’m still selling hats to this day.”

“It’s been really awesome getting feedback. Especially from celebrities, because in this day and age, people need that sort of solidified reference to know if something is good or not. People don’t know what they like until you put it in front of them. They see a celebrity wearing it, and then it’s like ‘Oh that’s so cool,’ though they’ve probably seen it 100 times before. It’s only cool now that you have the solidified reference wear it,” he says, “you kinda have to lean into the things that you cannot change.” 

Other pieces have also made their way into the spotlight. SZA wore his Red Leather Scorpion Jacket on stage during her GNX Tour. 

“The jacket that I made for her, I designed three years ago. And she wore it last year,” Madden says. He believes in creating things that last, that exist beyond trends, that have a life of their own. That’s a large part of the philosophy behind KRIS MADDEN. 

“I love workwear. I like military-inspired garments. I love working with leather,” he says. “Not a lot of people do the high-detail stuff with leather that I have figured out how to do.” 

Now, he’s preparing his most ambitious project yet: a runway show in late April, one week before the Kentucky Derby. His timing is intentional, with Derby week bringing in visitors from across the country, and he wants eyes on his work. 

The show, called Adrenaline, will feature 40 full looks and more than 100 individual garments, all made by Madden over the past year. “If you do the math, that’s one piece every three days consecutively,” he says. All hand-sewn, patterned, and fitted by him and him alone. 

It will unfold within a fictional future set in the year 2065. In Madden’s imagined world, corporations have accumulated enough wealth to control governments and global resources. 

The staging is cinematic. The warehouse setting for the show will become a hyper-real 2065 world where corporations rule governments and rogue operatives fight to stop them. Heavy fabrics, leather, and tactical silhouettes will play into that sense of danger and intensity. A cargo container holds a final reveal, “I have this huge cargo container, and the very last look for the show is this humanoid, and she’s like hung up by wires, and I don’t want to spoil the ending, you’ll probably figure it out. But that’s a part of the theatrics. It’s a really scenic show.” 

“I’m trying to portray the intensity of everything,” he says. “The whole thing is funded by me.” 

Seven years after that first wool crewneck, Madden has already carved out a name in music, fashion, and street culture. And yet, he still moves like someone with everything to prove. 

When he talks about the future, his ambition is incontestable. He was born with a stammer. Though that never stopped him from being the center of attention or achieving his goals, saying his own name has always been a hurtle while networking. First impressions often are everything. 

Last year, during a collaboration with Cole Bennett, they discussed dreams and what he wants in life, he laid it out: he wants to reach a point where he doesn’t have to say his name at all. “One of the biggest things where my speech comes into play is saying my own name. My goal is to walk into a room, and I will never have to say my name ever again. So everyone just knows who I am; that is the grand scheme behind every move I make. To always be remembered.”